In addition to contortion, you can find me enjoying live music,
paying as I wish in museums, exploring the city with my bike gang
or "bang," creating portmanteaus, toying with my ukulele, playing
the drums, singing along, dancing, cooking pseudo-vegetarianly,
climbing fences, failing to cultivate plants, discovering new
passions, and rising up singing.

Trying to help myself and other people stay human. I don't mean
that in a "We're all going to turn into werewolves!!!" way. I mean
that in a "We're all uncompleted beings, conscious of our
incompletion, and our attempt to be more fully human" way.

music: I'll take it all as long as it has meaningfully organized
sound and silence. I know that's granular, but I can get down to
The Meters and Steve Reich, Destiny's Child and Thelonius Monk,
Santogold and Tori Amos, The Roots (oh The Roots) and Frank Zappa,
The Postal Service and the Modern Jazz Quartet (oh Milt Jackson!),
Stevie Wonder and Fiona Apple, Dead Prez and Ben Folds, Stravinsky
and Jill Scott, Ani Difranco and Common, Regina Spektor and John
Cage. This list doesn't really scratch the surface, particularly
with respect to classical and jazz. I have an unusually close
relationship with Gustav Mahler.

movies: I'm not a huge movie person but my interests mostly fall
into the so-bad-they're-good and actually good categories. See if
you can sort them out: Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The
Savages, Up, Bring It On, The Graduate, Amelie, Pulp Fiction
(Tarantino in general), The Usual Suspects, Spaceballs (Mel Brooks
in general), The Princess Bride, Mean Girls, Legally Blonde,
Volver.

books: I've been trying to make myself read more fiction for a
couple of years now and keep getting drawn back into a non-fiction
whirlpool. Old friends are Vladimir Nabokov, Ralph Ellison, Walt
Whitman, Elizabeth Bishop, Paulo Freire, Daniel Pinkwater, bell
hooks (even though she came hard at Beyonce's neck), Howard Zinn,
Virginia Woolf, Teddy Adorno, Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

food: anything made with love from good ingredients and shared with
good people, but especially quinoa, avocado, pineapple, greens,
Thai, empanadas, Mexican, sandwiches.

I returned from a two-week trip to Mexico with just the small
backpack I had brought with me and the customs officer almost
didn't believe I had been gone for as long as I had with such a
small amount of stuff. He was also impressed I went by myself. "You
are a very brave woman." (This is my goal, to impress customs
officers with my daring packing strategies.)

So material possessions aside, I need:
1. some time and space to be alone
2. loving relationships with my friends and family
3. chances to learn by doing and making mistakes
4. meaningful work aimed at people thinking and acting together
toward change

That's four. Reaching a little:
5. periodic retreats from urban life to be in nature